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With Madagascar’s government paralyzed after a recent coup, looters are invading the African island country’s protected wildlife sanctuaries, harvesting trees and threatening critically endangered lemurs and other species, conservationists said this week.
Marojejy National Park in northern Madagascar has been closed to tourism. In other parks, rangers are abandoning their posts, according to reports.

Added Later: Thoughts from Kansas has a more indepth post on the lemur – as well as pictures of the second new lemur. Check it out.

Added Even Later: One of the more interesting things about Josh’s post is the few tidbits of info we learn about Steve Goodman. We need more of this kind of thing. Not because we should all be name droppers but because it puts a human face on science and makes it harder for those who oppose science. If one knows about someone like Steve Goodman who “…basically lives in the field, coming back to the Field Museum now and then to drop off specimens…” it becomes harder to believe scientists are engaged in some shadowy conspiracy to silence critics and enforce ideological conformity, etc.

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"You may not be willing to admit that you resemble an ape; if your thousandth ancestor is more like an ape than you are, you may, if you wish, call it a coincidence. But if that thousandth ancestor's forebears become progressively more simian as you trace back the geneological lines, you will have to admit that somewhere in your family tree there squats an ape." Earnest Hooten

Charles Darwin

"But I had gradually come, by this time, to see that the Old Testament from its manifestly false history of the world, with the Tower of Babel, the rainbow at sign, etc., etc., and from its attributing to God the feelings of a revengeful tyrant, was no more to be trusted than the sacred books of the Hindoos, or the beliefs of any barbarian." Charles Darwin: The Autobiography